16-Year-Old Arrested in Connection With Fatal Shooting of Girlfriend’s Family Member
This is a press release from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office. The information has not been proven in a court of law and any individuals described should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty:
On 4/19/2026 at approximately 06:13 A.M., the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office was contacted regarding a possible victim of gunshot wounds who was being transported to the Covelo Volunteer Fire Department on Highway 162 in Covelo, CA. The shooting incident occurred on a dirt road near Charlie Hurt Highway. The victim was identified as a 38-year-old female from Covelo, CA who was reportedly shot and being transported by a citizen in a vehicle to the Covelo Volunteer Fire Department. When the citizen arrived at the fire department, they were unable to locate any emergency medical personnel, so they transported the female victim to a nearby address on South Airport Road in Covelo to summon emergency assistance.
When Sheriff’s Deputies arrived at the address on South Airport Road, they contacted numerous parties who were attempting to assist the female victim. Law enforcement personnel examined the female victim and determined she was unconscious and had numerous suspected gunshot wounds. Sheriff’s Deputies and Round Valley Tribal Police Officers initiated Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) on the female victim and requested emergency medical personnel respond to the address on South Airport Road.
Law enforcement personnel continued to administer CPR until emergency medical personnel arrived and took over life-saving procedures for the victim. On 4/19/2026 at approximately 06:55 A.M., life-saving efforts were determined unsuccessful, and the female victim was pronounced deceased by a paramedic at the scene.
Based on the information gathered during the initial response, Sheriff’s Deputies initiated a homicide investigation and contacted the Sheriff’s Office Investigations Bureau to respond. Sheriff’s Detectives responded to the scene and took over the homicide investigation of the death of the 38-year-old female victim.
Numerous interviews have been conducted and search warrants have been authored and served related to the homicide investigation.
During the homicide investigation, Sheriff’s Detectives identified a 16-year-old male juvenile from Covelo as the suspect in the shooting. It was also determined that the male juvenile was previously in a dating relationship with a 15-year-old female juvenile from Covelo. There was a domestic violence incident involving the male juvenile and female juvenile which was unreported to law enforcement.
During the early morning hours of Sunday 04/19/2026, the female juvenile was driving a vehicle in Covelo and was being chased by a vehicle being driven by the male juvenile suspect. The suspect followed the female juvenile to numerous locations in Covelo and was reportedly discharging a firearm out of the vehicle he was driving. The female juvenile eventually stopped the vehicle and the male suspect approached and ordered her out of the vehicle at gunpoint. The female juvenile was physically assaulted by the male juvenile suspect and was in sustained fear for her safety. The female juvenile victim was able to drive away from the incident and reported the details to other family members.
Later in the morning hours of 04/19/2026, the female juvenile victim was on the phone with a family member, who was the 38-year-old female from Covelo, CA. The female juvenile heard several gunshots in the background while on the phone, which was determined to be the shooting where the 38-year-old female was murdered.
By connecting the earlier domestic violence incident between the male and female juveniles with the ongoing homicide investigation, Sheriff’s Detectives developed probable cause that the 16-year-old male juvenile was responsible for the shooting death of the 38-year-old female on a dirt road near Charlie Hurt Highway in Covelo.
Sheriff’s Detectives determined the 16-year-old male juvenile was responsible for numerous crimes earlier in the morning of 04/19/2026 involving the female juvenile during the domestic violence incident. An arrest warrant was sought and authorized for the male juvenile suspect for the following charges:
646.9 PC – Stalking
422 PC – Criminal threats
243(e)(1) PC – Domestic batteryInvestigators received information indicating the male juvenile suspect left the Covelo area and was possibly in the Oroville, CA area in Butte County. Sheriff’s Detectives coordinated with law enforcement in Butte County and the Oroville Police Department to attempt and apprehend the male juvenile pursuant to the arrest warrant. During the evening of 04/19/2026, Investigators and Butte County law enforcement personnel searched numerous locations and interviewed possible witnesses in the Oroville area but were unable to locate the male juvenile suspect.
On 04/21/2026 at approximately 11:00 A.M., Sheriff’s Detectives received information from the Oroville Police Department regarding the whereabouts of the male juvenile suspect. Oroville Police Officers located the male juvenile at a restaurant in Oroville. When attempting to arrest the male juvenile, he fled the location. After a foot pursuit, Oroville Police Department Officers were able to apprehend the 16-year-old male juvenile without further incident.
The male juvenile suspect is being held at a juvenile detention facility in Butte County pursuant to the arrest warrant issued during this investigation. Investigators are facilitating the extradition of the male juvenile to Mendocino County where he will booked at the Mendocino County Juvenile Hall.
Additional charges are being sought against the 16-year-old male through the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office related to the homicide investigation.
Names of the involved juveniles will not be released as juvenile names and records are exempt from public disclosure.
A forensic autopsy has been scheduled for the 38-year-old female homicide victim, and additional information to include the decedent’s name will be released as this investigation progresses.
Anyone with information related to this incident is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100.
Earlier:
- Woman Killed in Early Morning Shooting Near Covelo
- MCSO Releases Info on Woman Found Shot in Covelo; Homicide Investigation Underway
Update:
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Seriously OMFG. The Covelo kids. Cell phones and acting all nuts. Ruby, Kadejah her stuff with Fallis he duped her early. Some folks are going to defend this ridiculous behavior. Oh he…oh she…
Mind your own.
Snitches.
Its disgusting no better than a rabid effing dog.
not too much different than there in garbageville
they watch and do the same stuff online
your kids probaly are too…..
i dont know why anyone would live in
mendo or humboldt if they didnt have to
Or any other county in the state where you have underclass kids idolizing the ‘gangsta’ behavior they see online. Lot of media companies are profiting from shoving it down their throats too.
“i dont know why anyone would live in
mendo or humboldt if they didnt have to”
Have you ever been to mendo or humboldt?
yeah
unlike you
im born and rasied there (here in mendo)
watched boomers get all the cheap land and cop out
green rushers come in drive up proces
not pay taxes
raise thier mutant spawn
leave a mess
it was a great place to be amd raise a family at one point in time
that time is gone
Eh, I’d say Mel has been around longer than some of us have been alive and seen a few things around here.
Also, don’t blame boomers for jumping on cheap land. You’d do the same exact thing in their situations. What you can do is understand real estate cycles and boom/busts and position yourself self for something later. If you think about it and go back to the origial Homestead Act land rush, they didn’t pay a thing for 160 acres. For each child you had. There was an extra reason people pumped out huge families and it wasn’t all to raise a bunch of farm hands. It got you free land. Boomers just go in at a time when property taxes made a seismic shift in the 70s, the Homestead Act sunsetted, and suddenly people with large tracts of land were hit with multimillion dollar tax bills they couldn’t pay. So it was pit and parceled and these off-grid, back-to-the land types took advantage of it. So again, they didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have at the time. You can raise a family 160 acres. Hell you can do it with 40.
100%. Not everyone, but sooooooo many parents raised their kids to be sociopaths. They didn’t mean to, but the results where devastating for Humboldt. A little bit in Mendo and Trinity too.
what do you think happens when a large % of the people in your community come there specifically to be criminals and engage in illegal activity
have youever been to Round Valley?
lots of great folks there amd lots of folks who came there to do bad stuff
it sucks when your home becomes a maggot magnet
Seen it myself! I’ve lived on Lost Coast since 1979. I came here for the land, basically as a back to the lander. Got a job as a caretaker, not growing-related. Not many years later I watched as greedy real criminals moved in to engage in illegal activity. I’m so glad most of them moved away as their “business” became unprofitable. I’m still here for the land, and the people here also for the land.
Right on Sister!
Try, unparalleled beauty and a majority of great people.
where did he get the gun? if from either parent, well, they should be charged and held accountable also!! without the gun, nobody would be dead!
I would say that someone that angry and twisted would have just as easily stabbed someone who he felt had wronged him.
You can say anything! But, it doesn’t make it true. Statistics and our entire human history prove otherwise. If you could stab something up close or use a projectile weapon the difference in risk to oneself is dramatically different.
When you’re sufficiently enraged, personal risk is not a factor.
It’s far easier to kill with a firearm. And you know it
“without the gun, nobody would be dead!”
Who knows, he might have been better with an ax than Pistol Pete.
Still could be dead. Once can initiate a fatal blow with a brick or a broken bottle too. Or a piece of rebar or some household chemical ingestion. Or anything with a rope.
Clearly California needs a few more gun laws, who knows one or two or maybe a hundred more might be enough to bring this to an end. Do it for the children.
A law requiring guns to be locked up could have prevented this.
A law charging any adult who provides a gun to a juvenile as an accessory to any crime that juvenile commits might also have helped.
Because people intent on doing bad worry about a law , last time i checked it was against the law to kill someone and semed to stop them
Where did he get the gun?
And might the person from whom he got it have taken better care if they knew they would also face serious criminal repercussions?
Those laws are already on the books. They will be prosecuted if applicable I’m sure, but clearly they didn’t have the deterrent effect some would hope for. This paradigm keeps proving itself over and over.
Let’s no scapegoat, kids in the Mendo hills have easy access to guns and knives, this is the wild west, if u call Sheriff in Covelo or in the hills expect to wait an hour to 2 before Leo’s show up, this is why protecting yourself and having guns in rural america is the only way to defend yourself. Wise up
I think you’re onto something, instead of banning guns we should make murder illegal. That’ll stop ’em.
Might. If. Possibly. Ideally. Not a good legislative strategy for curtailing the rights of the majority that aren’t your target.
That is a law already
You know enforcing that outside of having cops come to your home each night for a lockdown inspection is nigh impossible. You can require all you want. Then things actually have to be in their places.
I’m pretty sure that is already a law. You have to sign an affidavit of safe storage (form BOF 978) when you buy a gun now in the state of California. If a juvenile somehow gets their hands on your gun and commits a crime with it, you can be charged for “criminal Storage” which is a wobbler and can be a felony, child endangerment which can be a felony, and also you can be sued up and down by the victim’s family.
Do you need your diaper changed?
When someone starts throwing a tantrum, that’s usually the cause…
Control the twisted humans, guns are not the problem.
Gun laws don’t save lives.
Yes, we agree on that point.
It entirely depends on what services he receives while in custody, and what support he receives after release.
Simply locking someone up where they usually learn to become an even more hardened criminal, and then dumping them onto the streets with no assistance reintegrating and becoming stable will almost certainly lead to crimes in the future.
On the other hand, give him job training and/or education while he’s behind bars, and requiring housing, employment, and sobriety as terms has been shown to result in much lower rates of recidivism.
Zero recidivism after capital punishment.
This comment section just keeps deteriorating. If you don’t like it here, leave it, good riddance
People can change a lot between 16 and say, 30! Redemption is possible. We have to give them that benefit. That, in part means him not becoming part of a gang while incarcerated. Guidance. Mentoring. The law recognizes under 18 as deserving of special consideration. Environment can damage a young person and their choices, until them come more into their own values.
And he will have to live with his tragic choices, all his years.
Another outstanding covelo citizen. They must teach assault in school there.
It was a great place to live once. But to many people moved here and brought the city with them. And natural beauty I guess that is why Newsom is up to his elbows in my wallet. Born and raised in Southern humboldt. And it has become the worst cess pit I have ever lived in. MOVED AWAY A YEAR AGO AND DONT PLAN ON EVER COMING BACK. To many clueless idiots. I have had more then my fill of them.
But still can’t stop yourself from coming back to spread what misery you you can?
Someone should have reported the “domestic violence incident involving the male juvenile and female juvenile which was unreported to law enforcement”.
It might not have made any difference, but allowing shitbag abusers to get away with it only leads to more abuse.
Not to mention that, shooting a gun from a vehicle while chasing somebody all
over town is… well, a bit beyond a “domestic violence incident” at that point, no?
Yeah domestic violence is an argument and a couple broken doors. This is cold blooded murder
The Genocide and Vendetta continues today in Covelo, Round Valley Ca. Reading about what happened in places like Covelo reminds me that harm doesn’t just ‘stay in the past’—it shows up in today’s lack of social safety. When people are dehumanized or ignored, violence and fear follow. Real prevention starts with building support, investing in safety for everyone, and calling out the power that lets it happen.
Wish I could find a copy as it’s out of print. Used copies on Amazon for $1400 and the cheapest listing on EBay is over $600.
You can borrow & read it online at the Internet Archive, for free!:
https://archive.org/details/genocidevendetta00carr
Aha! That’s super, thanks.
You can read for free on archive.org
That not true. There is no “real pervention” in the sense other than being prepared for self defense. There is no such thing as “calling out the power that let’s it happen” without letting anger and resentment eat away at what who is left. Who has ever had a better life by keeping resentment against the past rule the present? Has that attitude ever led to reconciliation? Has it ever led to “safety?”
The only example I can think where “building support and investing in safety for everyone and calling out the power that let it happen” has ever been formally attempted is the genocide of the Jews in WWII and the subsequent Nuremberg Trials. And now there is the Isreal/Palestinian War which is apparently can only end if one manages to conquer the other. Humans just are not built for justice. They are built to resent. And they are born to take advantage.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-passes-controversial-antisemitism-resolution/a-70715643
It is almost like we have these violent and hateful tendencies hard-wired into us. The ending of that slow film “Bugonia” kinda says it right out loud. Directly.
We are all driven by internal aggression and survival. The issue is choice. Covelo…oh Covelo. Love Covelo, spent lots of time in Covelo. You dip in with the alternate assholes your at risk. The types that find it “funny” ehhhhh to watch babies that got a hold of an almost empty beer fall in a fire and never get her lil hands tended to. Or the 2 year old stumping on a club foot, never been to the Dr. The normalization of crappy behavior,
Kadijah lured by an older yabo guy.
Ruby killed by her ” cousins and friends”
The tribal officer gunned down by “family.”
COME THE HELL ON WHEN IS ENOUGH DISGUSTING BEHAVIOR ENOUGH?
This jerkazoid running around shooting and this happens. People will post in Facebook cops in town so the idiots lay low. A mamma tries to stand up and is gunned down.
How do 16 yo get nice cars, thousand dollar phones, guns, not able to really read, write or talk other than “yo, yo, yo, ya know whadd I mean?” and he deserves that stuff. A misogynistic jerk. We gotta start raising some better quality young men. This desire to live a THUG LIFE ain’t nothing but pain n strife.
RIP Audrey this is terrible what happened to you.
Ah…young love
[edit by Kym]
Nonsense. Could be you are being satirical but, if so, not doing it well enough to be clear. If not being satirical, you are just wrong. Fine people exist here even if they have trouble with not so fine members of the community. Usually tribal members are more polite in dealing non tribal people than non tribal people. I’m grateful for their presence. It would be boring as hell if everyone have the same shitty attitudes in comments.
You seem to be nothing but a bigot
Covelo needs to incorporate and form a City Council and make decisions for itself and stop counting on corrupt county of Mendocino to figure anything out! Laytonville is also unincorporated, these communities have no representation or abilities to change, time to form Cities and figure out the problems and work towards solutions
Different ethnic groups over tens of thousands of years evolved a psychology and intellect ideally suited to the conditions in which they lived. Physical environment, and social conditions vary widely especially when on different continents. The psychology, intellectual capacity and world view resulting from this selection isnt necessarily compatible with European values, laws and world view.
Success gets imitations. Failures disappear. That is the human course that ebbs and flows everywhere. There is no being “ideally suited.” Everyone either adapts or fails. “European values, laws and world view” is the result of constant adapting and America the result of even further adapting. And hopefully will continue adapting.
?????